It's Friday (in the US and Europe). Are you exhausted, or excited?

This dichotomy represents a bit of an artificial binary choice for many of us in the working world. Often, the very things that excite us, that new assignment or project, the colleague joining or re-joining our team, or a bit of new technology, such as generative AI, are both exciting, and also, as we begin to work alongside them, just a bit exhausting as well.

I continue to hear from clients, colleagues and clinicians (yes, I love alliteration), that Generative AI is changing their work; either it is making the really annoying crap less likely something that they have to directly lead, or making things that would take 20 hours be completed in 2 hours instead. In many of these cases, they are leveraging Copilot, an enterprise version of ChatGPT or a Google model on their phones, and often, not telling their boss, IT or anyone else about what they are doing. They are just finding ways to get more work done faster, and moving on to the next thing.

Then, there are a group of folks who did all that last Spring, and have now matured to the next stage of consideration; they are standing up implementations of GenAI that improve, enhance, optimize, extend decision making, allowing for customer service, consumer, and internal interactions that wouldn't have been possible before, perhaps even dabbling in synthetic data, causal and predictive analytics also, as well as all sorts of research, content generation, video development, avatar design and deployment (I really wish I had trademarked the word avatar a few years ago), and the like.

The following article highlights both of these scenarios quite well:

https://academic.oup.com/jamiaopen/article/6/3/ooad079/7255314

But, if you are in either of these camps, or perhaps in both of them, I am willing to bet you are a) excited and b) exhausted, simultaneously. Because, you have begun to see that tasks that used to take 2 days now take 2 hours and that research that used to be done in 2 weeks can be finished after lunch, but then, you are also probably finding, what about this next idea, and the one after that, and so on and so forth until it is just about midnight and then, you look up at your clock and wonder...where did all the time go?

AI, like all innovations, will take some time to get used to, but as it works its way through our minds and our ecosystems, many of us are still working long hours, still driving towards fixed goals and expectations, and, for the most part, still in very much human bodies; I was with a partner earlier today who, I think, was joking that their roadmap included Human-Computer Interaction, i.e. "robot-ification" of all customers within 2 years...

Let's take a moment to reflect on why we adopt these innovations, how we structure our mental and physical environments to enable wellness and set ourselves up for a future where excitement and exhaustion can live side by side, but hopefully only for a short while as we evolve to a future state of mind, and to improving outcomes for the organizations, the individuals and the people in our lives who matter.